Designfusion Blog

How to copy styles from an existing document to an active document

John Pearson - Thursday, August 29, 2013

I recently had a technical support call, in which a customer wanted to add her own styles to the company template. She did not have access to the company templates, to change the styles, but needed to add specific styles for her current project. She wanted to know if there was a way to achieve this task without having to recreate the styles in every new document. Fortunately the answer is yes. There is an often overlooked tool in the styles dialog called the Style Organizer. The Style Organizer tool is found on the Style dialog box.

The following steps are used to copy a style from an existing document to your active document:

Step 1.From the active document choose View > Style > Styles.

Note: This example uses images from the part environment. The steps are the same in the draft environment, but the ribbon bar looks different.

Step 2.On the Style dialog box, set the Style Type box to the type of style you want to copy.

For example, you may want to copy an existing Face Style that you previously created in an older document. In this case you would highlight the Faces Styles, as shown below.

Step 3.On the Style dialog box, click the Organizer button.

Step 4.Browse to locate the existing file that has the styles that you want to copy.

Note: In this example, I browsed for an existing file called Head Board.prt. Notice that all the Face Styles for Head Board.par are listed in the left side window and all the Face Styles of my active part are listed in the right side window

Step 5.Locate and select the Face Style that you want to copy and click Copy.

In this example I want to copy a “Wood, Cherry” face style, from the Head Board.par. I scroll down to locate the Face Style, highlight it, and then click Copy.

Notice that the “Wood, Cherry” face style now exists in my active part file.

Step 6.Close out of the command and use the style as you see fit.

Remember, you can copy any style, such as Dimension Styles, Drawing View Styles, Hatch styles, etc. into your active document. You may have noticed that you can also delete unwanted styles, using the command.

This is also a great tool for updating templates. If a user has created a style that he/she uses all the time, the CAD administrator can use this command to copy it into the company template. This is much easier than trying to recreate the style and also ensures accurate results. I hope you find this tool as useful as I do.